Wildfires in the Land of Frozen Ground — 1,000 Mile Long Pall of Smoke Blankets Burning Siberia

It’s another day in a record hot world. And in a few hours, just below the Arctic Circle in Siberia, the temperature is predicted to hit 33.2 C (or just shy of 92 degrees Fahrenheit). According to climate data reanalysis, that’s about 15-20 C above average for this time of year over a land filled with cold weather adapted boreal forests and covering ground that, just below the first few feet of duff, is supposed to be continuously frozen.

(33. 2 C [92F] temperatures run to within 3.7 degrees of Latitude south of the Arctic Circle [66 N]. These are readings in the range of 15-20 degrees Celsius above normal and are likely record ranges for the area. Nearby, enormous Siberian wildfires now burn. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

All along the southern and western boundary of this region of extreme heat, very large wildfires now rage. Sparking near and to the east of Lake Baikal during early April, May and June, the fires have since run northbound. Now they visibly extend along an approximate 1,000 mile stretch of Central Siberia ranging as far north as the Arctic Circle itself.

(NASA’s LANCE-MODIS satellite shot for June 30, 2016 shows enormous smoke plumes rising up from intermittent wildfires apparently burning across an approximate 1,000 mile stretch of Central Siberia. For reference, right border of frame is approximately 1,200 miles.)

Today’s Siberia is a vast thawing land and armies of firefighters are now apparently necessary to stop or contain the blazes. Already interspersed with deep layers of peat, melting permafrost adds an additional peat-like fuel to this permafrost zone. When the peat and thawed permafrost does ignite, it generates a heavier smoke than a typical forest fire. This can result in very poor air quality and related incidents of sickness. During 2015, a choking smog related to peat fires forced an emergency response from Russian firefighters. The thick blanket of smoke currently covering Siberia (visible in the June 30 LANCE MODIS satellite shot above) now blankets mostly uninhabited regions. But the coverage and density of the smoke is no less impressive.

Peat and thawed permafrost fires have the potential to smolder over long periods, generating hotspots that can persist through Winter — emerging as new ignition sources with each passing Summer even as Arctic warming intensifies. During recent years, wildfires in the Siberian Arctic have been quite extensive. According to Greenpeace satellite analysis, 2015’s wildfires covered fully 8.5 million acres (or about 13,300 square miles). These reports conflict with the official numbers from Russia. Numbers Greenpeace indicates fall well below the actual total area burned.

(Wildfires erupt to the north and west of Lake Baikal in this June 27 rendering of the Japanese Himawari 8 satellite imagery.)

Thawing permafrost under warming Siberian temperatures not only generates fuel for these wildfires, it becomes an additional source of greenhouse gas emissions. And as the area of land wildfires burn in the Arctic expands together with the heat-pulse of human-forced warming, this amplifying feedback threatens to add to an already serious problem.

85 Comments

Jay M

To belabor the last post, we will await all the scholarship that can be cited to indicate how much intra hemisphere jet stream flow there has been over historical time. Really, with phase change seeming to be happening, might be reasonable to point out where the system might be unsettling.

Jay M

Cheers, Jay. I agree. There’s a lot of science ahead on the issue of loss of seasonal variability and changes in predictable seasons due to human forced warming. I think we need to figure out what’s the best ground to fight on, though. There’s a lot at stake here.

I think the fact that meteorology was slow to embrace AGW, and Climate Science specifically did not “do weather” has resulted a large number gaps in our understanding of the processes and effects of AGW.

Colorado Bob

Something in my wheelhouse –
On the last thread Andy in SD spotted a new site in Alberta burning. He asked if it was clouds, or smoke. Clouds are bright white and have distinct shapes, smoke is dull, and smeared by the winds . As one looks at these fire images, notice the levels of clouds and smoke, these peat fires don’t produce enough lift to drive the smoke high into the atmosphere. They lay lower , and clouds can block one’s view of them.

I could tell immediately that the ground was burning along with the vegetation. These new fires are in a close cluster, most likely caused by lighting strikes. The satellite image showed very little wind, so a fat dense mushroom of smoke was seen. At the 250 meter resolution, one can see the tell tale signs of the ground on fire. It is a yellowish brown color in the smoke , when trees burn there is a blue cast to the color of the smoke. I’ve been following these fire events for some time. Over 10 years, and this “ground on fire” component, is really a big shift.
Think of a cutting torch , you turn on the gas , and spark the flame. The Acetylene Gas burns bright yellow, and willowly with thick black ribbons of carbon coming of the flame. Then you turn the oxygen valve, and it pops into and sharp point of pure blue heat. With nearly every Acetylene atom covered into heat.

Oxygen is the key, these slow smoldering fires in the ground produce some of the worst combustion products man has ever seen. What ever they burn, coal seams in Penn., or tiga forest in Siberia.

These peat fires are some of the worst
These fires are huge, hidden and harmful. What can we do?

June 28, 2016 — As forest fires devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, last month, a different sort of fire may have started beneath the ground. Peat, a carbon-rich soil created from partially decomposed, waterlogged vegetation accumulated over several millennia and the stuff that fueled Indonesia’s megafires last fall, also appears in the boreal forests that span Canada, Alaska and Siberia. With the intense heat from the Fort McMurray fires, “there’s a good chance the soil in the area could have been ignited,” says Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Desert Research Institute in Nevada.

Unlike the dramatic wildfires near Fort McMurray, peat fires smolder slowly at a low temperature and spread underground, making them difficult to detect, locate and extinguish. They produce little flame and much smoke, which can become a threat to public health as the smoke creeps along the land and chokes nearby villages and cities.

Colorado Bob

Colorado Bob

Suwido Limin was a longtime University of Palangkaraya professor who founded a volunteer firefighting brigade and spent two months in the field during last year’s haze crisis.
After the fires last year, his condition worsened, and he was diagnosed with cancer in February.
Limin, an ethic Dayak, also helped draft a regulation on indigenous rights in Central Kalimantan that has been submitted to the provincial government for approval.

Griffin

Excellent description of the importance of Oxygen to the type of fire produced CB!
Your explanation is readily visible when comparing the different fires visible in daily satellite shots. The yellowish smoke over central Russia looks like a toxic blanket.

Thanks for this, Bob. A mini-post all its own. Excellent research and a rather rough subject.

This notion of burning ground is pretty well out of people’s everyday context. We don’t usually concern ourselves with ground fires. House fires, forest fires — these kinds of events are more familiar. But burning into the ground, deep beneath the ground. That’s strange and invokes a kind of deep-seated fear.

Now add to the fact that this is happening in a region where the permafrost is thawing and adding additional fuels to the peat. So you’ve got warming burning the peat — generating these fires that were nowhere near as wide ranging as they were before. And you’ve got warming adding fuel in the form of thawed permafrost.

The final ingredient is that these fires can basically smolder continuously underground, season to season, year to year as long as there’s fuel. And when you consider fuel, you’ve got about a billion tons of carbon in that thawing permafrost. That doesn’t include the carbon in the peat that’s already there. Nor does it include the equatorial peat carbon store that is now more vulnerable to fires due to increased heat and drought in that region.

So when we think about climate change mitigation and what that will take, I think this should be a serious concern.

Colorado Bob

When I was young , the idea that the ground could burn slowly over the winter , and the Siberia forest would lite on fire the next spring was unheard of. Now, it is a seasonal event. And when I was young we never dreamed the same sort of event would occur along the equator .

When I was and ES major in the early 1970s, we considered burning peat-lands as a likely process in global warming. It was only later that such carbon feedbacks were considered not plausible, and NOT included in models. Some climate models prepared (but not published) for Limits to Growth (1972) did have Arctic tundra carbon in them.

I expect that the IPCC will be vilified in history for their failure to recognize and advise on the timing, extent, and extreme hazard of AGW.

As a result of IPCC’s failure to discuss reality, we have not begun to address the moral and ethical issues of AGW. We have not begun to address the fragility of engineered infrastructure in a climate that is outside of the engineering basis of design. We have not begun to address food production in climate where every season sets extreme weather records.

Changes in Jet stream behavior are likely to change surface wind behavior, which is likely to change ocean currents/ circulation. ( http://phys.org/news/2016-06-ocean-circulation-implicated-abrupt-climate.html ) I worried about the NH becoming a solar collector for the Arctic. Now, it is clear that the entire planet can be a solar collector for both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Suddenly, we have no clue as to how fast the Arctic Tundra can thaw, dry, and burn.We only know the process is ongoing. Moreover, burned forest and peat looks solid, but contains large amounts of water soluble carbon. Thus, residue from fires can be dissolved, to feed CH4 production in rivers and the ocean.

Not only is RS very bright, but he has the courage to tell the truth. And, he has the energy to seek out what is important today.

Colorado Bob

Jacob

Some folks close to me don’t trust Hillary and they somehow think that makes Trump the better candidate (or that they can trust him to be a competent President). Though I would have preferred Bernie, the system has ensured it will be Hillary for the Dems. Hillary has an image problem that might make the unthinkable happen. That being said I don’t see how anyone can figure Hillary’s image, let alone her qualifications, are worse than Trump’s.

Pretty clear that Trump is his own worst enemy. His statements tend to make him seem both outrageous and un-Presidential. Looking at polls, it seems that only Rasmussen (which tends to lean right) has him ahead. Poll averages give Hillary a 4.5 to 6 point lead nationally. The recent Reuters poll put her at 10 points ahead.

Colorado Bob

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wili

Shawn Redmond

It would seem the insurance industry sees ACD as an immediate issue.” Up until 2008 flooding in Canada averaged 400 million$ per year, since then the average is 1 billion$! ”

“It is critically important that we improve the flood resiliency of our communities,” said Kathy Bardswick, president and CEO of The Co-operators in the release. “Flooding is the most common type of natural disaster in Canada and it will continue to worsen as a result of climate change. Our product is comprehensive, flexible and simple, and is available everywhere in Ontario – even in the areas at the most severe risk of flooding.”“It is critically important that we improve the flood resiliency of our communities,” said Kathy Bardswick, president and CEO of The Co-operators in the release. “Flooding is the most common type of natural disaster in Canada and it will continue to worsen as a result of climate change. Our product is comprehensive, flexible and simple, and is available everywhere in Ontario – even in the areas at the most severe risk of flooding.” http://www.canadianunderwriter.ca/insurance/co-operators-launches-overland-flood-insurance-1004095492/

1. The heat. Back to back record hot years.
2. The moisture. Relatively heavy rainfall for the month (3rd wettest)
3. Lake Mead still drops.

The upshot here is that you need a lot more rain to make up for the loss due to evaporation. In a warming environment, even if it rains more, you still get worsening drought due to moisture loss unless it rains a lot more.

– A sharp pair of eyes might want to take a look at the data here here:
( I had to revisit my Dr. — and get my ear trimmed again (basal cell carcinoma – my beach patrols and sailing likely spurred it into action. Traffic jams and a blocked public transit made it take all day. Am still the richer for my past activities — and I have plenty of ear.🙂

labmonkey2

And all that rain the central US experienced this spring, feeding into the Gulf, seems to have caused some rather extensive algae blooms.
Who’da thought??
—
A smelly, “guacamole-thick” muck is fast spreading in the waters of Florida’s Treasure Coast, where angry residents blame the federal government, state water managers and Florida Gov. Rick Scott for yet another spiraling environmental catastrophe.

Concluding comment from the carbonbrief story:
“Prof Guy Kirk, professor of soil systems at Cranfield University and author of the News & Views article, writes that the findings of this “exemplary” monitoring study might be a sign of how soils could amplify warming in future, perhaps triggering a self-reinforcing loop. He writes:
‘[The study’s] evidence that climate change has already started depleting soil carbon in the German Alps raises the possibility that a positive feedback between climate and ecosystems is beginning.'”

>>>>>>These currents, which today drive the Gulf Stream, bring warm surface waters north and send cold, deeper waters south. But they weakened suddenly and drastically, nearly to the point of stopping, just before several periods of abrupt climate change, researchers report today in Science. In a matter of decades, temperatures plummeted in the north, as the currents brought less warmth in that direction. Meanwhile, the backlog of warm, southern waters allowed the Southern Hemisphere to heat up.

AMOC slowdowns have long been suspected as the cause of the climate swings during the last ice age, which lasted from 110,000 to 15,000 years ago, but never definitively shown. The new study “is the best demonstration that this indeed happened,” says Jerry McManus, a paleo-oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and a study author. “It is very convincing evidence,” adds Andreas Schmittner, a climate scientist at Oregon State University, Corvallis. “We did not know that the circulation changed during these shorter intervals.”<<<<<<<<<<

There follows a brief consideration of cause, including the possible role of Heinrich events: whether the Heinrich events often associated with weaker AMOCs are a cause or effect of the slowdown.

>>>>>>>>”….this project accomplished a stated aim of the expedition cruise industry: to create a “corps of ambassadors” who return home feeling connected to the area in which they’ve traveled and who will work to protect the polar regions. On each of the four cruises, a small but remarkably dedicated group of passengers attended most or all of the ice watches and enthusiastically participated in the measurements at the North Pole ice station. Giving them the opportunity to participate in research aided in their understanding of the state of the Arctic sea ice cover, accomplishing the tour operator’s aim of providing an educational and entertaining experience. Additionally, some stated that opportunities to take part in scientific efforts would influence their cruise choices in the future.” <<<<<<<<

Yeah. It’s a shame – maybe I’m wrong, but it looks to me like CO2 fertilization is starting to ramp up in the summer, in the northern hemisphere, especially in Siberia. In the earth.nullschool CO2 images for this area, you can see that the overall readings for Siberia are pretty low, with faint light spots corresponding to the fires. We can see the boreal forest valiantly trying to absorb the CO2 from Europe and China, but apparently not able to keep up. We can see the tremendous plumes of CO2 from the U.S., the EU, and China. We can see much more intense bright spots from the Canadian fires – possibly the Canadian fires are in heavy timber.

For those new to earth.nullschool, the image linked to in this post is a CO2 image. Light areas correspond to high CO2, dark areas correspond to low CO2.

The oceans don’t seem to be giving us much help, these days. There is some apparent CO2 absorption, corresponding to darker areas, but not much. The oceans don’t seem to be very good carbon sinks, these days. There is a tremendous amount of CO2 in the oceans. Let’s hope that the higher temperatures don’t start to drive it out of the oceans into the atmosphere.

Without the help we are getting from the great carbon sinks of the tropical and boreal forests it looks like things would be much, much worse. And those great carbon sinks, increasingly, are burning.

Like Robert said, it’s been like this for months now, and will likely be like this for months in the future.

Somebody ought to make a YouTube video of the carbon monoxide from the fires in Siberia over the last three months or so, using images from earth.nullschool. I’ll do this myself but it might take a while to learn the software and learn how to do it.

With these fires, we always report on the human impacts, the number of homes destroyed, for instance. What about the non-human impacts? How is wildlife dealing with this new class of forest fire? We need to be talking about this, painful as it may be.